Seedy politics at present found in past

This year's primary election was mild compared to 1868 contest.

This year's primary election was mild compared to 1868 contest.

May 12, 2008|LIBBY FEIL

Part one of three Campaign speeches. Battling political editorials. Mudslinging. Making dubious accusations against the other candidate. Just politics as usual -- in 1868. Before this year's Democratic primary, you'd have to go back to the 1868 presidential election to find a time that this much political attention was paid to Indiana. That election, the first post-Civil War contest, was a battle to determine the future of the newly reborn United States -- and of the newly freed African-Americans. If you think candidates and their supporters play dirty politics today, you will really be shocked at how dirty, even venomous, politics was 140 years ago. The 1868 election fit right into a long tradition of seedy politics. In 1828, when frontier lawyer Andrew Jackson ran against sitting blueblood president John Quincy Adams, Jackson's opponents gave him the nickname "Jackass" and labeled his wife an adulteress. (The truth was that Jackson married a woman whose former husband had falsely told her that he had obtained a divorce; Jackson and his wife had to remarry officially after the divorce was final.) In turn, Jackson's people accused Adams of procuring a young woman for Czar Alexander I during Adams' time as an ambassador to Russia. Grover Cleveland's campaign in 1884 ran into trouble when adversaries revealed the existence of a possible illegitimate child and began heckling him at public appearances with cries of "Ma, Ma, where's my Pa?" By these standards, then, the election of 1868 was par for the course. Compared to today, though, the rhetoric and tenor of the campaign was unbelievably nasty, especially in St. Joseph County. The year 1868 was the first presidential election held since Abraham Lincoln's assassination, the Civil War's end and the true death of slavery. After Republican Lincoln's death in April 1865, his vice president Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, had risen to the presidency. In 1868, the Republican Party was desperate to retake the White House and cement Lincoln's legacy with pro-Union, anti-Confederacy, pro-African-American legislation. The Democratic Party was just as eager to retain control of the country to relax federal supervision of the South and head off attempts to allow African-Americans to vote. In this high-stakes atmosphere, St. Joseph County's Republican and Democratic newspapers squared off in a war of hyperbole, presenting their own candidates as supremely moral saviors and their opponents as savagely depraved devils. Most mainstream newspapers today strive to present all candidates objectively and to limit overt endorsements to the editorial pages. Back in the 1800s, however, almost all newspapers were openly aligned with political parties, and around elections entire issues would be dedicated to presenting positive news about their candidates and negative revelations about the other party's men. The St. Joseph Valley Register aligned itself with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln. (In November 1860, when Lincoln won the presidency, the Register proclaimed "Lincoln & Liberty!! The Nation Redeemed. Sham Democracy wiped out! Old Abe the Father of many People!" and continued, "We have not room for (all) the details of the magnificent National Triumph of Freedom, Justice and Humanity.") The Register had its origins in the South Bend Free Press newspaper, which Schuyler Colfax bought in 1845 and ran until 1863. The local Democratic paper was the National Union, edited by Ed and Emma Molloy starting in 1866. Ed and Emma had a flair for the caustic and sarcastic, and in 1868 their presidential campaign coverage was so inflammatory that it practically caused the paper to burst into flames. Although Colfax was no longer editor of the Register when the Molloys began editing the Union, his close relationship with the Register ensured that he and the Molloys became fixed political enemies. As if that were not enough reason for antagonism, Colfax, in his capacity as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, had a pivotal role in submitting articles of impeachment against President Johnson, a Democrat. Johnson was later acquitted -- by a single vote -- but the episode was a bitter one for Democrats. Libby Feil is manager of Local & Family History Services at the St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend.